I often find that, within academia and even within the arts, a project is only allowed to be interdisciplinary up to a certain point: then it’s joking aside, and what are you doing, really? Do I plan to publish the piece I’m working on as an ordinary book, on ordinary paper, where one page follows the next? If it’s academic in nature or even presenting itself as a knowledge text, will it have a straightforward bibliography and super-linear index section? If not, how will I respect my many source materials? How do I preserve the in-between nature of my work (something I feel is inherently important to its aims), and still make a piece of work which can be disseminated and received openly?

(Note: Wordworth’s Prelude is full of lines stolen from Milton and the ancients, which didn’t seem to cause anyone any problems…)

My aim is not to demonstrate that I am so clever that I can write something no-one can understand, that wilful obscurity Joyce mocked in his construction of Ulysses. I’m trying to knock down the walls between ways of knowing things because these were built by patriarchal cultures. I’m trying to make my work EASIER to understand.

Many of the presentations at Bodystories/Perforum played with the divides between disciplines and practice methodologies. Gerry Kearns led a walk to explain his Foucauldian/Benjaminian deconstruction of the geography of the history of Irish Catholic institutions (so, as he described it, we looked over his shoulder at the turrets of the women’s prison rising above the trees). Jacqui O’ Riordan’s presentation on memory and personhood was based exclusively on photographs of her own mother. Performance artist LaBeti recited Lorca’s poetry during a burlesque striptease, and spoke later about her discovery that stripping was the missing part of her ability to engage with the texts she had researched academically. While LaBeti performed, an installation by Laura Pauwels set up in another corner of the theatre space invited participants to post messages of hope for victims of sex trafficking into a little blue box.

In a way, attending Bodystories/Perforum has been traumatic, because I have realised how much farther I want to go. It’s scary to cut ties with a set of practices where you feel safe, and where people know what to expect from you and seem to tolerate you. I feel now that I have been struggling to keep the work safe enough that it can still be published as poetry, that I can still call myself a poet and leave it at that, but that isn’t the case. I’m not sure what to call myself.